Pasadena, Texas City ready to end 18-year absence of series

Published 6:24 am, Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Other than the series with South Houston, Galena Park and Sam Rayburn, no football program has played Pasadena more on the football field than this one.

Now just imagine if these two programs hadn’t decided to put the series in mothballs for the last 18 years?

But now after all these years, Pasadena and Texas City will be rekindling the series, celebrating the 47th meeting that’s been 18 years in the making. Friday night’s kickoff is set for 7 p.m. at Veterans Memorial Stadium.

Texas City leads the series 25-20-1. Friday’s meeting will be the first between the two programs since Oct. 15, 1993 when the Stingarees won 27-0 here in town. It was a noteworthy outcome because the shutout snapped Pasadena’s streak of 38 consecutive games without being blanked.

The first known meeting arrived on Oct. 25, 1935 with Texas City, in the midst of a championship season, again blanking the Eagles 20-0. The first known victory for Pasadena in the series was a decisive one, a 51-0 shellacking by head coach C.P. Wall’s crew during the 1939 season.

After Pasadena became a Class 4A school in 1951, the series stopped for five seasons. But it was renewed in 1956 with the Eagles winning 33-0. During Pasadena’s march to the 1958 Class 4A state championship game, the Eagles tuned up for the playoffs with a convincing 40-6 win over the Stings on Nov. 14.

From 1956 through the 1966 season, Pasadena and Texas City were District 12-4A rivals. The Eagles had the Stingarees’ number, winning eight of 11 meetings in that span. But even when the two went their separate ways, the two programs kept each other on their schedules. From 1968 through the 1973 seasons, they opened the season against each other.

In that span arrived the only tie, a 21-21 stalemate in the 1973 contest that saw Pasadena trailing 21-0 at one point in the game.

After another brief period of putting a stop to the series, Texas City spoiled Pasadena’s debut as a Class 5A school on Sept. 6, 1980. Even Mother Nature tried to get in on the spoiling act when the historic game was delayed a day by Hurricane Danielle.

The series and the rivalry really began to take off by that year because from 1978 through the 1993 seasons, the series was uninterrupted. It was in those years that Texas City grabbed the lead in the series that the program will hold tonight. That’s because during those years, the Stings won 12-of-16 meetings.

As for which program has scored more points, it’s Texas City with 798 compared to Pasadena’s 750. That’s not really much of a difference considering they’ve played 46 times. There’s been 16 shutouts over the years. Eight of the 16 had already arrived by the conclusion of the 1945 season.

So after this long of a wait for the return of the series, what won’t be shut out Friday night is the intrigue and how the two will respond against each other.